TransferSummit
Yet another government definition for the term "open standards" is incoming because the Home Office isn't satisfied with the current wording of its so-called Action Plan.
The department's IT wonk Tariq Rashid confirmed at an open source forum in Oxford yesterday that the government had been "lobbying against" the current …

Analysis
For well over a decade companies have been trying to trade in open-source popularity for mountains of cash, and for well over a decade the vast majority of them have failed. Downloads, it would appear, aren’t readily convertible into dollars.
This has left Red Hat the only billion-dollar open source vendor, a distinction no one …

Summit
Customers who remain only halfhearted open source converts aren't doing enough for Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst.
At his opening keynote at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Whitehurst said the company needs to start preaching to its customers to share their internally developed code with others.
"The vast majority of software written …

Analysis
Almost five years ago, Sun's then CEO Scott McNealy told me his company had little intention of entering the great database fray. "You know, we haven't decided that is a war we want to go fight," he said. "Why not let them all beat each others' brains in?".
By laying down $1bn for MySQL, Sun fattened its arsenal and flashed its …

Comment
Somebody toss me a Che Guevara T-shirt. Google and Microsoft have gone to war over open source software.
On Aug. 10, Redmond submitted the Microsoft Permissive License to the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Should the license be approved, Microsoft would receive the "open source" seal of approval that only the OSI – by self- …

Open...and Shut
Recent survey data from the Eclipse Foundation and elsewhere make it abundantly clear that cloud computing is top of mind for a majority of enterprises…and that no one really has a clue where to hire cloud developers.
According to Dice (warning: PDF), demand for cloud-savvy job candidates spiked 221 percent in the last year, …

Open ... and Shut
Increasingly the third standard within enterprises for databases, MongoDB, has been claiming a lot of victories lately. In relative terms, it has become the second-hottest skill to have on one's resume, right after HTML5, according to Indeed.com job trend data. And despite plenty of hating on its technology, with one person …

Open...and Shut
For those who believe software is a quick road to riches, think again.
As RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady detailed in his Open Source Business Conference keynote, the top 20 software companies are relatively low on Fortune 500's totem pole of revenue, and not a single one lands in the top 10. And of the top 20 companies on PwC' …

Open...and Shut
Open source is a great way to drive adoption of one's software, but is a generally poor way to monetize that software. The more open one's code, after all, the less compelling the need to pay for it.
Unfortunately for Twitter, Facebook, and other new-age, web service developers this same principle holds true for their open APIs …

Red Hat is still looking to expand beyond its traditional market of tech-savvy companies into a more mainstream world nearly a year after the open source vendor first declared its intentions to woo conservative customers away from rivals Microsoft and Oracle.
According to the company's EMEA boss, Werner Knoblich, who spoke to …

Open source vendor Zmanda is adding hooks into its MySQL database backup software for shops using IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager to mastermind the policies.
The company on Monday unfurled a new feature for Zmanda Recovery Manager called — get ready for some unwieldily precision here —Tivoli Storage Manager Option for Zmanda …

Red Hat is looking to fill gaps in its increasingly burgeoning portfolio of software goodies by declaring it may soon get into the BI game.
The company’s JBoss CTO Mark Little told journalists at a press event in London this morning that plans were afoot to develop software for that market.
He would not be pushed, however, on …

Open source vendor Alfresco Software is rolling its enterprise content management (ECM) system into IBM's Lotus collaboration products to serve as a stronger counterpoint to Microsoft Sharepoint and reach smaller-sized business customers.
The company is also teaming with RightScale's software-as-a-service cloud management …

LinuxWorld
Full of free software pride, SugarCRM CEO John Roberts has revitalized his attack against the Open Source Initiative (OSI) characterizing the organization as weak and confused.
After being the open source community's whipping boy, SugarCRM now enjoys a position of power. Last month, the software maker agreed to place a fresh …

Lotusphere 2010 preview
Microsoft bashing has always been a key function at IBM's annual Lotusphere conference which lands in Orlando, Florida, again next week. Funny how collaboration software will do that.
In years past, executives have swing out massive statistics of how many “seats" Lotus Notes and Domino has gained or held against Exchange and …

Analysis
Plumtree is being acquired by BEA. This raises two points. The first is the perennial question of integration that arises whenever a vendor buys another that has a directly competing offering: how will the two products be merged? How long will it take? Will they, in fact, be merged at all? If not, how long will the acquired …

Analysis
Someone once said something about being careful what you wish for. This is more or less how we're feeling about Google's agreement to contribute code to database maker MySQL.
As a close open source software watcher, we've been miffed by Google's interactions with the so-called community. Yeah, Google has its nerdtopia Summer of …

Whatever pleasantries once existed between Sun Microsystems and Red Hat have vanished. This won't come as a shock to many of you. The companies have been jawing in the press for some time. The extent, however, of Sun's loathing for Red Hat is more profound than many imagine, with Sun's CEO Scott McNealy largely confirming a …

Analysis
With the announcement last week by IBM, BEA, Oracle, SAP, Siebel, IONA and others that they are collaborating to develop a language neutral programming model tuned to the needs of SOA initiatives, it looks like a little more lustre has rubbed off J2EE. But it also looks a little like something deeper could be going on: the …